Bayou Blue

An unrelentingly grim documentary, Bayou Blue focuses on the crimes of serial killer Ronald Dominique, who raped and murdered 23 men across Southern Louisiana from 1997 to 2006. Filmmakers Alix Lambert and David McMahon explore the trail of horror and loss left by Dominique, interviewing family members of four victims, and the arresting officers in the case. We learn something about those dead men through the recollections of their survivors, many of whom still suffer from unresolved anguish and grief (one woman, Octavia Jones, lost five male relatives to Dominique). Lambert and McMahon use the official recordings of Dominique's confessions to communicate nightmarish details about the killings, and they take their camera down roads and into fields, visiting the awful places where the murders happened and the bodies were dumped. The directors also attempt to find some resonance between the impact of these crimes and the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina, which ended a way of life in some small communities and continues (via spilled oil in the gulf) to erode the shoreline. While that connection is a bit of a reach, it still comes across here as haunting. Recommended. (T. Keogh)